Harry Potter book leaked

This post contains no spoilers

The new Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been leaked four days before its release.

The copy of the book is just photos of each page, but there it is for everyone to download.

Scholastic purportedly spent $20 million to keep leaks under wraps, but all it took was one untrustworthy person with a digital camera and lots of time to spare.

One wonders if it was worth the money at all. As Schneier says in the link below, people are probably going to still buy the book.

[link]

Update: The publisher has not yet confirmed, nor have they denied this is the true version. A few weeks ago there was a fake leak that caused a bit of an uproar.

The LA Times has more:

“There are multiple versions of what appear to be official copies of the book on the Internet, and they all look very convincing, but they are conflicting,” said Lisa Holton, president of trade publishing and book fairs at Scholastic. “Our goal is to take down all this different material, and by taking it down we’ll never know whether any of it was real until you read it yourself on Saturday morning.”

Salon has more:

How did “Potter” get out? I have no idea. One account fingers a Canadian fellow named Byron Ng who says he stumbled upon the cache after some intrepid Web searching. But it’s a complete mystery who posted the pictures. The person’s fingers can be seen in some of the shots, and there’s an occasional glimpse of a brown shoe. All you can tell is that the person is white and has a taste for drab carpeting — not to mention extremely good connections.